“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
— Desmond Tutu
Tutu said this phrase hundreds of times. It became his signature. Behind it was concrete experience: in South Africa silence meant complicity. Police killed children in Soweto. To stay silent meant to approve. Tutu refused to be silent, even when it risked prison.
I was born in Klerksdorp, a small mining town. My father was a teacher, my mother a washerwoman and cook. Black people could not walk on the same streets as white people. Could not sit on the same benches. Could not attend the same schools. I was nine when a white priest tipped his hat to my mother. I stood there unable to believe it: a white man showed respect to a black woman. That moment broke something in my mind. I became a priest. Then an archbishop. Then the voice of millions who were forbidden to speak. When you are silent in the face of injustice, you are not standing aside. You are standing with the one who strikes.